60 posts · 35,302 views
Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, quantum physics, and anything else worth writing about
William Lu
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- September 17, 2009
- 12:48 PM
- 1,314 views
How your emotional state affects how you hear speech
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I found an interesting study by Wang et. al investigating how the current emotional state that we find ourselves in modulates the auditory response of speech early in the sensory processing stream at the cortical level. Here's their abstract.In order to understand how emotional state influences the listener's physiological response to speech, subjects looked at emotion-evoking pictures while 32-channel EEG evoked responses (ERPs) to an unchanging auditory stimulus (“danny”) were collected. T........ Read more »
Wang J, Nicol T, Skoe E, Sams M, & Kraus N. (2009) Emotion modulates early auditory response to speech. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 21(11), 2121-8. PMID: 18855553
- August 20, 2009
- 03:37 PM
- 1,012 views
Did sleepwalking once serve as an adaptive function?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I readily admit that I use to sleepwalk as a kid. My dad once found me laid out at the foot of our considerably large staircase completely unscathed! As I reflect back on those sometimes hazardous, but mostly humorous unconscious experiences I can't help but wonder if somnambulism, the formal term for sleepwalking, once served as some kind of adaptive function. Were our ancient ancestors afforded the opportunity to escape the perils of the wild during states of deep sleep?There are countless sto........ Read more »
Ebrahim IO. (2006) Somnambulistic sexual behaviour (sexsomnia). Journal of clinical forensic medicine, 13(4), 219-24. PMID: 16564199
Kantha SS. (2003) Is somnambulism a distinct disorder of humans and not seen in non-human primates?. Medical hypotheses, 61(5-6), 517-8. PMID: 14592779
Mahowald MW, Schenck CH, Rosen GM, & Hurwitz TD. (1992) The role of a sleep disorder center in evaluating sleep violence. Archives of neurology, 49(6), 604-7. PMID: 1596195
Pilon M, Montplaisir J, & Zadra A. (2008) Precipitating factors of somnambulism: impact of sleep deprivation and forced arousals. Neurology, 70(24), 2284-90. PMID: 18463368
- September 30, 2009
- 02:22 AM
- 997 views
Bye bye modular, hello cognit!
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
What is a cognit you ask? It's a basic unit of memory or knowledge defined by pattern of connections between a network of neurons associated by experience.Termed by Fuster in 2006, the construct was created to solve the problematic yet popular view that the human brain is made up of discrete cortical domains dedicated exclusively to visual discrimination, language, spatial attention, face recognition, motor programming, memory retrieval, and working memory.Although the modular modeling of the br........ Read more »
Fuster JM. (2009) Cortex and memory: emergence of a new paradigm. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 21(11), 2047-72. PMID: 19485699
FUSTER, J. (2006) The cognit: A network model of cortical representation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 60(2), 125-132. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2005.12.015
- September 20, 2009
- 06:47 PM
- 966 views
Observation of tool use activates specific brain area only in humans
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The discovery that a species other than human has the ability to use tools has, quite frankly, lost its novelty. Just look at the New Caledonian crow. If trained properly, it can utilize up to three different tools sequentially to reach for a target food reward (Wimpenny et. al, 2009). It does this by first picking up a stick-like tool with its beak. It then uses this tool to retrieve a second tool which is then used to retrieve a third tool. Finally, the third tool is used to retrieve the food......... Read more »
Wimpenny JH, Weir AA, Clayton L, Rutz C, & Kacelnik A. (2009) Cognitive processes associated with sequential tool use in New Caledonian crows. PloS one, 4(8). PMID: 19654861
Peeters R, Simone L, Nelissen K, Fabbri-Destro M, Vanduffel W, Rizzolatti G, & Orban GA. (2009) The representation of tool use in humans and monkeys: common and uniquely human features. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(37), 11523-39. PMID: 19759300
- October 6, 2009
- 12:23 AM
- 826 views
Children recruit higher-order brain mechanisms during a numerical comparison task
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I've been endlessly scoring digit-symbol coding protocols (fun...), a subtest of the WAIS-IV measuring working memory, for the past few weeks at my new neuropsych externship so the following article seems particularly relevant. In a recent study by Cantlon and colleagues published in the latest Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, they decided to measure the brain activity of 6-7 year-old children during numerical comparison tasks using fMRI.An example of a numerical comparsion task:...participant........ Read more »
Song JH, & Nakayama K. (2008) Numeric comparison in a visually-guided manual reaching task. Cognition, 106(2), 994-1003. PMID: 17512516
Levitin, D. (2009) The Neural Correlates of Temporal Structure in Music. Music and Medicine, 1(1), 9-13. DOI: 10.1177/1943862109338604
Cantlon, J., Libertus, M., Pinel, P., Dehaene, S., Brannon, E., & Pelphrey, K. (2009) The Neural Development of an Abstract Concept of Number. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(11), 2217-2229. DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.21159
- August 10, 2009
- 01:52 PM
- 800 views
The negative health effects of perceived discrimination
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Discrimination has undoubtedly been the cause of suffering for many throughout human history. There have been countless reviews investigating the effects of discrimination on health, but none that have quite looked at the quantitative nature of this relationship. Pascoe and Richman decided to undertake this task by examining the strength of the evidence for the effect of perceived discrimination on multiple health outcomes through a meta-analysis. They discovered that an increased level of perc........ Read more »
Pascoe EA, & Smart Richman L. (2009) Perceived discrimination and health: a meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 135(4), 531-54. PMID: 19586161
- December 24, 2009
- 02:00 PM
- 787 views
Can modern day gadgets help combat prejudice?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Prejudice...we've all experienced it at one point or another. Defined as a preconceived belief, opinion, or judgment toward a group or person because of race, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., it also means a priori beliefs that include any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence. It's been the cause of countless wars and an infinite amount of unnecessary suffering. It must be put to an end once and for all! So how does today........ Read more »
Crisp, R., & Turner, R. (2009) Can imagined interactions produce positive perceptions?: Reducing prejudice through simulated social contact. American Psychologist, 64(4), 231-240. DOI: 10.1037/a0014718
Cunningham, W., Johnson, M., Raye, C., Chris Gatenby, J., Gore, J., & Banaji, M. (2004) Separable Neural Components in the Processing of Black and White Faces. Psychological Science, 15(12), 806-813. DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00760.x
Greenwald, A. (2003) Targets of discrimination: Effects of race on responses to weapons holders. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(4), 399-405. DOI: 10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00020-9
Harris, L., & Fiske, S. (2006) Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(1), 45-51. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsl037
Olsson, A. (2005) The Role of Social Groups in the Persistence of Learned Fear. Science, 309(5735), 785-787. DOI: 10.1126/science.1113551
Steckenfinger SA, & Ghazanfar AA. (2009) Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(43), 18362-6. PMID: 19822765
Wiekens, C., & Stapel, D. (2008) The Mirror and I: When private opinions are in conflict with public norms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(4), 1160-1166. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.02.005
- November 17, 2009
- 02:57 AM
- 780 views
The somniloquy hypothesis: How the immature brain learns facts
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
A while back I wrote about the possible adaptive function of somnambulism or sleep-walking. Well...I've come up with yet another hypothesis addressing a behavior falling under the category of parasomnias. Somniloquy or sleep-talking happens during stages of NREM sleep, the time declarative memory (i.e. factual knowledge) is consolidated. This seemingly bizarre behavior typically occurs in childhood and is outgrown by puberty. Presentation can vary from rhythmic nonsense words to long coherent sp........ Read more »
Gais S, & Born J. (2004) Declarative memory consolidation: mechanisms acting during human sleep. Learning , 11(6), 679-85. PMID: 15576885
- August 27, 2009
- 04:45 PM
- 768 views
Yet another reason not to consume cannabis
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
In 1936 an exploitation film directed by Louis Gasnier called Reefer Madness was made in an attempt to teach parents about the dangers of cannabis use. It told of fictional highschool students experimenting with the drug and their tragic and utterly ridiculous demise (e.g. manslaughter, rape, suicide). I'm pretty sure the majority of us now know that smoking marijuana will not cause someone to go on a murderous rampage or off themselves just because they're high. However, recent studies have fo........ Read more »
Puighermanal, E., Marsicano, G., Busquets-Garcia, A., Lutz, B., Maldonado, R., & Ozaita, A. (2009) Cannabinoid modulation of hippocampal long-term memory is mediated by mTOR signaling. Nature Neuroscience, 12(9), 1152-1158. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2369
- August 10, 2009
- 12:19 AM
- 743 views
Chronic stress and its effects on brain plasticity
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Stress typically indicates a demand to adapt to challenges found in everyday life. However, when the stress is uncontrollable, unpredictable, and chronic it can increase the brain's vulnerability to disease.Dagyte et al. over at the University of Groningen investigated the effects of acute and chronic foot-shock stress on neural plasticity by using hippocampal cell proliferation and neurogenesis data collected from rats. They found that repeated, but not acute exposure to foot-shock stress cause........ Read more »
Dagyte G, Van der Zee EA, Postema F, Luiten PG, Den Boer JA, Trentani A, & Meerlo P. (2009) Chronic but not acute foot-shock stress leads to temporary suppression of cell proliferation in rat hippocampus. Neuroscience, 162(4), 904-13. PMID: 19482059
- September 6, 2009
- 02:41 AM
- 743 views
Erasing phobias early in life
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The model of fear extinction originated from the Pavlovian classical conditioning paradigm in the early 1900s. Defined as a reduction in a conditioned fear response following a non reinforced exposure to a feared conditioned stimulus, fear extinction is known to involve the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). It's also a frequently striven-for goal in cognitive behavioral therapy during the treatment of various phobias including arachibutyrophobia; the fear of peanut butter sticking to........ Read more »
Kim JH, Hamlin AS, & Richardson R. (2009) Fear extinction across development: the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex as assessed by temporary inactivation and immunohistochemistry. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(35), 10802-8. PMID: 19726637
- September 9, 2009
- 06:45 PM
- 732 views
Is inhibition a measure of free will?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Reading Alwyn Scott's "Stairway to the Mind" I came across an interesting tidbit of information pointing out that human's have a greater percentage of inhibitory neurons compared to other animals (human 75% rabbit 31%). For some unknown reason this made me think about the tricky construct of free will and the question of whether free will could be better measured not by what we chose to do, but by what we chose not to do. In other words, could free will be measured by a capacity to inhibit certa........ Read more »
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. (1989) Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933-938. DOI: 10.1126/science.2658056
- September 3, 2009
- 01:03 AM
- 721 views
The neural correlates of lucid dreaming
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I've always had a deep fascination for lucid dreaming and only a handful of times have I been fortunate enough to experience such a wondrous and relatively rare state of consciousness. In one instance I decided to meditate and that blissful experience has no doubt left an indelible memory. So what's really going on in the brain during a lucid dream? In a recent study Voss and colleagues over in Germany in collaboration with Hobson at Harvard Medical School decided to investigate the electrophysi........ Read more »
Hobson JA. (2005) Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. Nature, 437(7063), 1254-6. PMID: 16251949
- August 31, 2009
- 09:09 PM
- 692 views
The peripheral attenton deficit of primary psychopaths
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Described as cold, heartless, manipulative, selfish, and low anxiety, primary psychopaths frankly scare the bejesus out of most people including myself. Look at the case of John Wayne Gacy Jr., the American serial killer who took the lives of 33 boys and young men between 1972 to 1978; burying most of the bodies in his crawl space beneath his home. During his sentencing he was quoted to have morbidly joked that the only thing he was guilty of was "running a cemetery without a license". How fucke........ Read more »
Zeier JD, Maxwell JS, & Newman JP. (2009) Attention moderates the processing of inhibitory information in primary psychopathy. Journal of abnormal psychology, 118(3), 554-63. PMID: 19685952
- August 24, 2009
- 06:16 PM
- 669 views
Bid farewell to sleep deprivation's adverse effects on memory
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Graveyard shifts and all-night cram sessions are probably some of the worst things you can do to your brain and body. I know because sadly I've done both more times than I can count. It is well known in the sleep field that chronic sleep deprivation accelerates the adverse effects of aging (damn these premature wrinkles), causes emotional dysregulation, and significantly impairs memory. However, Chua et al. over at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore seem to have discovered a mirac........ Read more »
Chuah LY, & Chee MW. (2008) Cholinergic augmentation modulates visual task performance in sleep-deprived young adults. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 28(44), 11369-77. PMID: 18971479
- August 29, 2009
- 10:35 AM
- 642 views
The association between creativity and suicide
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Over the years a number of iconic musicians have met tragic deaths from either an overdose or suicide (e.g. Bradley Nowell and Kurt Cobain from two of my favorite bands); the former a possible mode of the latter. In light of DJ AM's recent passing, a prescription drug overdose the most likely culprit, and today's commemoration of Michael Jackson's 51st birthday, I couldn't help but ponder the possible associations between creativity, psychopathology, and suicide. Where is that fine line between ........ Read more »
Figueroa C G. (2005) [Virginia Woolf as an example of a mental disorder and artistic creativity]. Revista medica de Chile, 133(11), 1381-8. PMID: 16446863
Preti A, De Biasi F, & Miotto P. (2001) Musical creativity and suicide. Psychological reports, 89(3), 719-27. PMID: 11824743
Preti A, & Miotto P. (1999) Suicide among eminent artists. Psychological reports, 84(1), 291-301. PMID: 10203964
Stack S. (1996) Gender and suicide risk among artists: a multivariate analysis. Suicide , 26(4), 374-9. PMID: 9014267
Slaby AE. (1992) Creativity, depression and suicide. Suicide , 22(2), 157-66. PMID: 1626330
Pöldinger W. (1986) The relation between depression and art. Psychopathology, 263-8. PMID: 3575627
- September 25, 2009
- 09:19 AM
- 641 views
Why middle-agers shouldn't join the army
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Enlisting in the army is a significant life-changing decision, especially for someone who's middle-aged. Apparently there's an age cap of 42 for active duty. The reasoning behind this seemingly arbitrary number is that it allow for a 20-year military career before retirement. However, perhaps they should look toward a younger cutoff point in light of a recent study investigating the effects of sleep deprivation on arousal levels of middle-aged rats. But before we continue with this line of argum........ Read more »
Wigren HK, Rytkönen KM, & Porkka-Heiskanen T. (2009) Basal forebrain lactate release and promotion of cortical arousal during prolonged waking is attenuated in aging. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(37), 11698-707. PMID: 19759316
- August 14, 2009
- 02:22 AM
- 624 views
Do adults with Asperger syndrome really have ToM?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
People with autism are known to lack the ability to automatically attribute mental states to self and others also known as "mindblindness". A result of this impairment is failure on verbally instructed false-belief tasks. However, people with Asperger syndrome, a milder form of autism, seem to pass with flying colors. This presents a problem for the "mindblindness" theory. So do people with Asperger syndrome really have a theory of mind (ToM) contrary to popular theory?Senju, Southgate, White, a........ Read more »
Senju A, Southgate V, White S, & Frith U. (2009) Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome. Science (New York, N.Y.). PMID: 19608858
- September 28, 2009
- 09:42 AM
- 622 views
Why primate eyes prefer the color black
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
A recent study by Yeh, Xing, and Shapley over at The Center for Neural Science, New York University made a fascinating discovery about the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey and it's preference for black over white stimuli similar to that of humans. Here's a snippet from their abstract.From recordings of single-cell activity in the macaque monkey's primary visual cortex (V1), we found that black-dominant neurons substantially outnumbered white-dominant neurons in the corticocortical out........ Read more »
Yeh CI, Xing D, & Shapley RM. (2009) "Black" responses dominate macaque primary visual cortex v1. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(38), 11753-60. PMID: 19776262
- November 12, 2009
- 02:11 AM
- 614 views
The dual-tasking meditation master
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I recently read an article in the latest Scientific American Mind magazine discussing the cell mechanisms underlying meditative states. The author briefly mentioned the fact that expert meditators were able to avoid the attentional blink that lay people are prone to experiencing when barraged with rapidly presented visual stimuli.This brought up a question for me. Would expert meditators perform better on dual-tasks compared to age-matched subjects?I believe the answer is in the affirmative. My ........ Read more »
Farb, N., Segal, Z., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. (2007) Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313-322. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsm030
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